


The Girl Who Waited

by like_a_raven, mountain_born



Series: The Marvelous Tale of an Agent, an Archer, and an Assassin [35]
Category: Doctor Who, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Doctor Who/Avengers Crossover Fusion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 14:45:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7272397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/like_a_raven/pseuds/like_a_raven, https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountain_born/pseuds/mountain_born
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just your classic story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy joins covert organization, boy remeets girl, boy leaves girl for her own good (and a cellist), boy gets stabbed though the chest by an alien god, boy re-remeets girl, and girl finally decides enough is enough already.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Girl Who Waited

**Author's Note:**

> This is mountain_born's sandbox, she just lets me play in it, and I'm grateful. She's also an awesome beta and one heck of a friend.

D-Day Plus 16

 

Phil Coulson was finally getting out of the hospital.

Oh, sure, he was only going to make it as far as SHIELD Medical back on the base, where he could look forward to who-knows-how-long a regime of physical therapy and psych evals, but on the bright side, he had been deemed well enough to travel.

At least, he was well enough to travel in a SHIELD ambulance.

It wasn’t, he supposed, the brightest bright side ever, but he’d take what he could get.

Valerie was packing up the odds and ends he had accumulated over the last couple weeks -- cards and toiletries and word puzzle books and the like. He’d told her she didn’t have to, but she had insisted she didn’t mind, so he’d let her. Someone had to, after all. 

She’d been doing things like that over the past week: arranging his blankets, pouring his water, getting things he asked for. She did it all with a vaguely proprietary air. It was subtle, maybe, but there was something territorial about the way Valerie sat in the chair beside his bed. She held that spot like a woman who had the right to. 

Clint and River had been a little scarce when she was around. Phil got the impression that they had adopted a “if you can’t say something nice, stay the hell out of the kitchen” approach to his request that they be nice to Valerie. It was probably less than ideal, but what about his current situation wasn’t? He had enough to deal with as it was, so he didn’t push the matter with any of them. 

For the first couple days, he waited for the shoe to drop, for Valerie to bring up their recent separation, Gail, all of it. 

She didn’t, which really shouldn’t have surprised him. Valerie Custis was, after all, a class act. And class acts didn’t begin potentially fraught conversations at a time when either party was attached to an IV and a catheter.

So it had all kind of sat there, undiscussed and unacknowledged but incredibly present throughout her stay, which was now drawing to an end as his hospital discharge approached. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to try to have the conversation before she left or just hope she’d give him another chance to in the future.

“What do you want to do with these?” Valerie asked, indicating the collection of Get Well Soon balloons he had amassed from various well-wishers.

“I don’t know,” Phil said. “What do you do with--?”

“Sorry, didn’t realize you already had company,” Stark said as he barreled into the room with Steve Rogers in tow. He didn’t sound any more sorry than Phil had ever heard him sound (which was _not at all_ ).

Stark favored Valerie with a smile that Phil decided he didn’t particularly like. “And, yes, it’s true. I am Tony Stark.”

“Valerie Custis,” she offered, and Phil wondered if Stark could hear the note of amusement in her voice or if it was just for him. “And you’re Captain Rogers, aren’t you?” she added to the other man.

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“We heard they were kicking you out of this place, thought we’d come by and see you off,” Stark said.

“Thanks,” Phil said, not entirely sure what else to say. He was still trying to wrap his head around that fact that he’d somehow turned into a person _Captain America_ dropped in to visit.

There was an awkward pause, and then Rogers said to Valerie, “We hear you’re a cellist.”

“Oh, no,” Valerie said, without missing a beat and before Phil could even begin to formulate an explanation. “That was Gail. She moved back to Portland. She was a fling. I’m Phil’s long-term paramour. We met in college.”

“ _Paramour_?” Phil said, several minutes later, when Stark and Rogers had left. “Was that really necessary?”

“It’s not inaccurate,” Valerie said, going back to stacking cards in a shopping bag.

And it wasn’t, Phil supposed, but it was horrible. Unfortunately, while he didn’t think Valerie was going to initiate the conversation on the nature of their relationship, he suspected she would be willing to have that conversation if he were to initiate it. And he really didn’t have the energy, and this didn’t seem the best time, so he said, “Admit it. You wanted to see if you could make Captain America blush.”

“And I did,” Valerie said.

“Yeah, you did.”

“Think you went up in Tony Stark’s estimation,” Valerie said, setting the last of the bags next to the door, a half dozen balloon tied to the handle.

“Well, of course. I’ve got an intelligent, beautiful woman fussing over me and packing up my balloons. What’s not to be impressed by?”

“You say the nicest things,” she said.

But that wasn’t quite true. There was one thing in particular he hadn’t said in a very long time, and in light of everything that had happened, maybe it was time to. More likely it was way past time to, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that.

And it wasn’t that big a deal, was it? Three words. Certainly nothing it should take him days (years) of gearing up for. 

Valerie learned over and kissed his cheek. “I’m going to miss my flight if I don’t get going.”

“Yeah.”

“Call me, when you get back to your base?”

“I will,” Phil said. And then, in a rush, before he could lose his nerve again, he said, “Val, I . . . ”

“It’s all right,” she said, from the doorway to his room.

“It’s all right?”

“Yes. As Princess Leia said to Han Solo on the forest moon of Endor, I know. Call me.”

And she was gone.

Maybe it was a big deal after all.

 

One Week Later

“Really, Eloise, you’re just going to have to handle it,” Valerie said. “And I have complete faith in you.”

“I don’t know. If we could just go over the numbers one more time--”

“I’ve got to go. I’ll be in on Monday,” Valerie said, firmly, and hung up on her assistant for the fifth time that morning. She thought about taking off her Bluetooth earpiece, too, but there was always a chance she’d get a call about something that actually mattered.

Valerie picked up her phone and looked again at the picture her niece Mina, had texted her with the message “CAN YOU MAKE ONE LIKE THIS????” The cake (vanilla with a strawberry filling) was decorated with an elaborate pattern of dark purple swirls, The piping was going to be time-consuming and tedious, but Valerie had texted back “Of course” because her goddaughter was only going to turn sixteen once, right?

Honestly, a time-consuming, tedious cake-decorating task might be just what she needed right now. It’d been a week since she’d gotten back from New York, and she’d had one short phone call and a handful of text messages from Phil, none of them about anything substantial. And yes, there were incredibly mitigating circumstances, but she had expected to hear from him a little more than that.

Instead, she had cake. 

Valerie frowned, picked up the icing bag, and was just getting started when the phone rang.

She answered without looking at it. “What is it this time, Eloise?”

“Please hold for the Director of SHIELD,” said a voice that most certainly did not belong to Eloise.

Valerie’s hands jerked, sending a haphazard arc of purple across the top of the cake. “I--”

“Thank you.”

Annoyingly chipper hold music began.

Valerie sort of sank down to the floor, and wound up sitting with her back to the kitchen island. 

Good God. If they’d had an agent call her to tell her Phil was unconscious in the hospital, what did it mean when the _Director_ called? 

Had Phil died?

Jackson looked up from his kitchen dog bed, whined slightly, and then padded across the floor to her. He shoved his head under one of her hands, and whined again. Valerie patted his head automatically and distractedly. 

Where the hell had SHIELD found this hold music?

***

“What are you listening to?” River stood in the doorway, frowning at the speaker on Phil’s bedside table.

“Madonna. ‘Into the Groove,’” Phil said.

“No, I know what the song is. Why are you listening to it?”

“Because the 80s station is playing it?”

River gave him her _are you being deliberately dense?_ look as she came into the room. “But why are you listening to 80s music?”

“It’s my generation’s music,” Phil said. And as Valerie was fond of pointing out, the 80s may have been a swing and a miss on fashion, but they knocked music out of the park.

“You don’t listen to your generation’s music. You listen to music from a good forty years before your generation,” River said, sitting down in the chair beside the bed.

“I listen to 80s music.”

“Since when?”

“1980, or thereabouts,” Phil said.

“Smart ass.” River appeared to consider him for a moment. “So is this about Ms. Custis?”

“No, I’m pretty sure Val’s never inspired a Madonna song,” Phil said. “I feel like she would have mentioned it.”

River’s look went to _now I know you’re being deliberately dense_. “I meant your sudden interest in 80s music. Not the song. It’s what the two of you would have been listening to when you met, right?”

“I just felt like listening to it,” Phil said. Madonna ended and the station switched to Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie.” Phil picked up the remote and turned off the radio. “And now I don’t.”

“So how are things with you and her?” River asked.

“Fine.”

“So you’ve talked to her?”

“We’re in touch,” Phil said. “I texted her yesterday.”

“You texted Ms. Custis? Yesterday?”

“You should really just call her _Valerie_.”

“You should really just call her,” River said. 

“I thought you didn’t like her much,” Phil said.

“But you do. So you should call her.”

“I have. I mean, I will. I mean, I’m going to. I’ve just been busy. You know with, physical therapy and they want me to talk to Psych, and I’m still recovering.”

“You only play the ‘I’m still recovering’ card when you’re trying to get out of something. And you spent Clint’s whole visit yesterday complaining about how bored you are, so you can’t be that busy.”

She was good at this sort of thing. It was a hell of an asset in the field. It was pretty annoying at times like this.

“I just . . . there’s a lot to talk about and I don’t wanna mess it up.”

“Phil, I don’t really understand what you and Ms.-- Valerie have been doing all these years, but I’m pretty sure that _messing it up_ is exactly what you’re going to do if you don’t talk to her. And she’s probably not going to wait for you to figure that out forever. Frankly, in her shoes, I probably wouldn’t wait a week. You need to call her. Because you were miserable this winter.”

“I will,” Phil said again. “I will call her.”

Just as soon as he figured out what the hell to say. 

Just as soon as he figured out why she’d cut him off before he could tell her he loved her.

Just as soon as-- “What?”

River was looking significantly at his phone.

“I’m not going to call her while you’re sitting here,” Phil said. “I’ll call her later.”

“I can come back later--” River began, cutting off as Phil’s phone rang and Valerie’s name appeared on the screen.

Phil told himself that under other circumstances -- if he’d been closer, if he’d been sitting up instead of propped up in a hospital bed, if he’d been at one hundred or even seventy-five percent -- well, under other circumstances, he’d have beaten River to the phone.

Even if the truth of the matter was that he wasn’t as fast as River on his best day, and his best day on that front had probably been at least ten years ago.

“Hello, Ms. Custis,” River said, twisting in her chair so that the phone remained out of his reach. “Valerie, of course. No, Phil’s right here. Hold on.”

River held the phone out to him and smiled, then mouthed the words _See you later_ and left once he’d taken it.

Phil took a deep breath, then said, “Hi, Val.”

“Hi, Phil,” she said. “Did you know that SHIELD’s hold music is a Muzak version of Toto’s ‘Africa’?”

“It is?” Phil didn’t get put on hold internally often, but the last time it had happened, the music had been some kind of atmospheric classical thing with chimes. 

Wait. Why did Valerie know what SHIELD’s hold music was? He’d never called her from a SHIELD phone. “When were you on hold?”

“Just now. Nick called. It turns out he’s one of those people who’s so important, an assistant calls you for him and then immediately puts you on hold.”

“Nick?”

“Nick Fury? Your boss?”

“You call him Nick?”

“He’s not my boss.”

“And he called you because . . .” Phil said, feeling a little dizzy and a whole lot apprehensive about this entire conversation.

“You’re tetchy.”

“Fury said I was ‘tetchy’?”

“No, he said you were a whiny pain in the ass who was driving the medical staff insane. I was translating.”

“To ‘tetchy’?”

“It was more efficient,” Valerie said, sounding a bit tetchy herself.

Phil stopped to assess. His boss had apparently called his . . . Valerie to ask her to . . . well, he wasn’t sure.

“And he wanted you to . . .”

“He seems to think that if I visit, it might improve your mood.”

Phil made a mental note to kill his boss, just as soon as he had the strength to hold a gun steady.

“Well?” Valerie said.

Phil knew that the correct response was not “Well what?” The problem was that he had no idea what the correct response actually was.

“Well what?”

“I’m not coming to visit at your boss’s invitation, Phil.”

“Oh.” Phil hesitated because he still wasn’t completely sure where he stood with Valerie these days, and he probably had made that worse by waiting to get properly in touch with her. He was fairly certain that she either waiting for him to apologize that Fury had called her or for him to invite her himself. He just wasn’t sure which. Unless . . . 

“Val, I’m sorry Fury had to call you, because I should have done that myself. But I would like you to come visit. Please.”

There was a pause.

“I’m still mad at you, you know,” Valerie said finally. “If I come, we’re going to need to have a conversation about some things, and you’re not going to enjoy it very much.”

“I know,” Phil said. “But I still want you to come.”

“Fine. But I can’t come till after the weekend. Mina’s Sweet Sixteen party is Saturday.”

“Mina’s sixteen?”

“Tomorrow.”

“That doesn’t seem possible.”

“Well, it is, so I have to go finish her cake. I’ll let Nick know I’m coming. He said there’s a room or something I can use.”

“On base?”

“I assume. I’ll see you next week, Phil,” Valerie said and hung up.

Phil set the phone back on the table next to him, close enough to make sure that there were no more unauthorized answerings. 

Valerie was coming to the base. He supposed that in light of everything that had happened, he should be grateful she was still willing to visit him at all. Instead, he just found that he was nervous. He’d gone to somewhat significant lengths over the years to keep Valerie separate from his life at SHIELD. Oh, sure, he told her about things, but she never interacted with it in any way. 

Now she was coming to SHIELD’s global HQ, at the invitation of the Director, to walk and talk and apparently even sleep on base. And he not only had to figure out how to deal with that, he had to figure out what the hell he was going to sufficiently apologize for a situation in which he was more or less solely in the wrong. All right, entirely solely in the wrong. 

Where did a man even begin?

Phil picked up the remote control and turned the radio back on.

Billy Joel promptly advised him to “Tell Her About It.”

Phil changed to the Big Band station. At least Benny Goodman tended to keep his opinions to himself.

 

The Following Tuesday

Valerie wondered who exactly SHIELD thought they were fooling. Well, she supposed they thought they were fooling her, though she wasn’t sure if that was something she should be offended or amused by.

She supposed it was possible SHIELD had decided that she was a security risk who warranted special scrutiny, though in that case, letting her onto the base at all was idiotic, never mind the part where she’d been sleeping with a high-level agent for sixteen years. It was also possible they had mistaken her for some sort of royalty. More likely was that they were just fucking curious.

Her money -- all of her not inconsiderable fortune -- would be on that last. And she couldn’t really blame them. She’d have been curious in their place. She just wished they didn’t seem to think she wouldn’t notice. 

The woman waiting at JFK with the sign that read CUSTIS introduced herself as Nadine Washington. Valerie knew, from over a dozen years of hearing SHIELD stories from Phil, that she was Director Fury’s personal assistant. Valerie also knew, from well over a dozen years of working for various government agencies in DC, that this was not the sort of person who was dispatched to collect random guests of employees at airports. They had assistants who did that sort of thing. Hell, their assistants probably had assistants to handle that sort of thing.

Furthermore, when Agent Washington handed her off to one Maria Hill, Valerie knew that Deputy Directors of large agencies didn’t take random guests on tours.

 

The SHIELD base was . . . large. It was hard to form a detailed impression beyond that, except sleek and modern and busy. She followed Agent Hill across a wide grassy courtyard and into the halls of the Administration Center. It was a bit maze-like, turn after turn down one corridor that looked just the same as the one before and the one after. 

She was photographed for a visitor’s badge on a lanyard, which Agent Hill told her to wear whenever she was outside her room. It would allow her access to any areas or facilities she was allowed to enter. Attempting to enter others was, to put it mildly, discouraged. Not that she had any idea how she’d find them. She didn’t think she’d be able to find her way back to the front door without help, let alone top secret areas and weapons lockers.

Valerie had been unsure about being on what she still thought of as _Phil’s base_ even before she arrived. Now that she was here, she was willing to upgrade _unsure_ to _apprehensive_. She should have tried harder to insist that she would drive herself up. As it was, she had no car and an open plane ticket that meant no firm departure date. She didn’t think SHIELD would try to make her stay if she wanted to leave, but it still made her feel trapped. She didn’t like the idea that she couldn’t get away without asking someone to take her, and she had no idea who she was meant to ask, anyway. Maria Hill? Nadine Washington? Surely they had better things to do. Phil? Because there was no conflict of interest there.

Valerie followed Agent Hill out though what she thought was a different door into a different courtyard. The tour was brief, hurried, and overwhelmingly unhelpful. Agent Hill clipped along at a pace that was almost a jog, pointing out the buildings Valerie was allowed to enter: the public floor of the Admin Center, a recreation center with a snack bar and a PX, the guest residence hall that her luggage had already been delivered to. 

Valerie was about to ask for a map (preferably one with large red X’s on the buildings they’d shoot her for trying to enter), when Agent Hill came to stop in front of yet another building and said briskly, “Well, I’m sure you’re anxious to see Coulson.”

“Yes,” Valerie said, though she wasn’t sure at all. She was tired, and disoriented, and nervous, and the easiest thing to do seemed to be agreeing. It occurred to her that “Base tour with Maria Hill” might actually be a SHIELD interrogation tactic.

Agent Hill lead her into the building, down a hallway, and up a flight of steps. “Just though there. Let me know if you need anything,” she added, though she left without giving Valerie any indication of how to go about doing that.

All right then.

Valerie squared her shoulders, waved her lanyard in the general direction of the card reader next to the door, and walked though the indicated doors.

****  
Phil slumped against the pillows in his bed and reached for the water. He liked Padma, his physical therapist, but he was half-convinced no one had ever told her PT didn’t stand for _practically torture_.

He couldn’t quite decide if he was glad that Clint and River had left for their hideout in West Virginia the day before or not. On the one hand, they definitely needed the break, and there was something to be said for not involving them in his relationship with Valerie. On the other hand, even if accompanied by hardcore eye-rolling, River’s advice might not have been an all bad thing. But they had left, and there was nothing to do now but wait and hope he didn’t mess things up further before they got home.

He knew when Valerie arrived, even before she made it to his room. Blame the hyperawareness that goes with years of intelligence training, blame his hyperawareness of her in particular, but he knew the moment she opened the door to Medical and he heard a murmur that was probably introductions.

Phil pushed himself up so that he was sitting straighter in the bed, took a second to be thankful that his current wardrobe was more sweats and t-shirts and less hospital gowns, and put the water down on the table.

“Hello, Phil.”

“Hi, Val.”

She set her purse down by the door and came into the room.

“How are you?” she asked.

It took him too long to answer. He was busy looking at her. He’d forgotten she’d cut her hair, expecting the long hair she’d worn for the past ten years instead of the neat bob she’d shown up at the hospital with. 

“I’m okay. Good,” he amended. “You? When did you cut your hair?”

“Valentine’s Day,” she said. “Kind of an impulse.”

Oh. Oh.

“Well, um, it looks nice. I like it.”

“You don’t, but you’re sweet to lie,” she said, sitting down in the chair beside the bed. “And I’m fine.”

“And your family? Mina’s party was good?”

“It was. She tolerated all her relatives and then went off with her friends and we drank champagne in her honor. Everyone’s good.” There was a pause. “Oh, and my mother’s not speaking to me.”

“Again?”

Valerie’s stepmother, Julia, was a lovely woman. Her biological mother, Irene, on the other hand, was possibly Phil’s least favorite person on Earth, and given the number of people on Earth who had tried to kill him, that was saying something.

“I missed her wedding.”

“Irene got married again?” Phil asked. “That’s fast, even for her.”

Valerie’s mother had had something like seven or eight husbands over the years (Valerie’s father had been her second), but she’d been widowed a year or two ago and as far as Phil had been aware in January, there wasn’t another victim lying in wait. 

Valerie shrugged. “Oliver -- husband the fifth -- got out of prison. They reconnected.”

“Ponzi Scheme Guy?” Phil asked. “She remarried Ponzi Scheme Guy?”

“She says he was framed.”

“He confessed.”

“It was coerced. I’m supposed to ask you to help clear his name, if I’m going to insist on continuing to associate with you.”

“Humph.” Irene had never liked Phil. She’d made that clear the first time they’d met, the first year he was dating Valerie back in college. Phil Coulson was Not Our Kind, Dear, and he was Not Good Enough. “So how come you missed the wedding?”

“You asked me to come to New York.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So I outrank Irene’s wedding but not Mina’s birthday?” 

“You were in intensive care. That outranks a lot. Besides, Mina’s only going to turn sixteen once. I can catch Irene’s next wedding.”

“Right.” Phil reached for the water because it gave him something to do, and because his throat was suddenly very dry. “Right,” he said again. “Look, Val, I’m an idiot. I know that. I’m an idiot and I’m sorry and I know I have no right to ask you anything but, I don’t know, can we start over or something?”

“No, of course we can’t start over,” Valerie said. “I’ve got decades invested in you. You don’t just get to blank slate that away because you were an idiot in January. We can try to figure out how we go forward from here, but that means working with where we are now. Not pretending it all away and ‘starting over.’”

“What if we can’t do that?” Phil asked. “What if we can’t fix things?”

“Then at least we’ll know that.”

“I really screwed up, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did.”

“I’m sorry, Val.” 

“I know that. But that’s past. The question now is what you’re going to do about it.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” Valerie said, standing up, “you give that some thought, then, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

*****

Valerie had to stop three people for directions, but she eventually found her way back to the guest residence hall Agent Hill had shown her earlier. She had to stop two more inside the building to find her actual room. She waved the lanyard they’d given her at the pad by the door, waited for it to beep at her, and entered Guest Quarters W14.

It looked like a slightly upscale hotel room. There was a small sitting area just inside the door with chairs and a table, semi-separated from the bedroom furniture at the back by an archway. She had a microwave, a tiny refrigerator, and one of those single serve coffee machines that made consistently mediocre coffee. 

Her luggage was by the bed. Valerie wondered if they’d searched it. She wondered if the room was bugged. She wondered if she was being paranoid or just realistic. 

Bond girls made it all look so much more glamourous than it was. 

And now she had “Nobody Does It Better” stuck in her head.

She took off her lanyard and tossed it onto the little square of counter than held the microwave and coffee machine. She should unpack, she supposed. But unpacking meant she had decided to stay and in this moment, Valerie wasn’t sure that she had. 

She should pull out her laptop and check her emails to make sure Eloise had everything under control at the office. Or she should at least check to see what things Eloise had already lost control of. 

What she wanted to do was bake something, preferably something full of fat and sugar and chocolate, like a very elaborate and gluttonous cake. And Valerie wasn’t flattering herself if she said that she was an extraordinarily good cook, but producing a cake with a microwave, a coffee machine, and no ingredients was beyond even her limits.

And there had not been any kitchens on the list of places she would go without being interrogated and/or shot.

Valerie made herself a cup of coffee. She poured the coffee down the sink and took a bottle of water from the mini fridge instead. She checked the lampshade and the picture on the wall and the curtains for bugs, though she didn’t _really_ expect to find any and she didn’t know what she was looking for, anyway. She debated trying to find one of the places she was allowed to eat dinner, then unpacked the baked goods she’d brought for Phil’s beleaguered medical staff and ate four cookies, instead. She made more coffee.

She wanted to talk to someone, but her options were limited. Most of her friends didn’t know the whole story about Phil, because SHIELD frowned upon widespread dissemination of the identities of its field operatives, apparently. So most people who knew Phil through Valerie thought he worked for the United Nations and had been a civilian collateral casualty of the destruction in New York. Her best friend, Lori, knew more of the truth, but Lori was in Paris where it was about one in the morning. That left her family.

Well, it left the parts of her family she was in regular contact with. She had one half-sister she only heard from when one of her nieces needed something paid for, and more former stepsiblings than she could reasonably be expected to remember. Dad and Julia would be at dinner. Her older stepbrother, Webb, was . . . well, he was an older brother. She loved him, but he tended to try to step in and fix things. And that left Carter.

She called him her younger brother when she wanted to annoy him, but she and Carter were actually about the same age. (She was three months older than he was, which had been fun when it meant she could do things like drive before he could, and was less fun now that they had reached the sort of milestone birthdays that came with black balloons.) They had met when they were seven, and her divorced father had married Carter’s widowed mother.

They had instantly disliked each other. There was a great deal of jealousy on both sides: unlike the Brady Bunch, their families had not combined along neat gender lines, and Valerie had not liked it when her father did “boy things” with Webb and Carter any more than Carter had liked it when Julia did “girl things” with Valerie. It had not helped matters when they’d gotten older and started dating each other’s friends. 

They’d gotten over it in college (it helped that they had gone to different schools in different cities, Valerie suspected, with Carter heading off to Charlottesville while she and Webb picked schools in Lexington). And now, Lori aside, Carter was probably Valerie’s best friend.

She ate one more cookie, dug her phone out of her purse and called him.

“Hey, how’s it going?” he asked.

“It’s okay,” she said. “The coffee’s dreadful.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a coffee snob, Val,” Carter said cheerfully. “How’s Phil?”

“He’s an idiot,” Valerie said. “But he’s an idiot who looks better than he did last time I saw him.”

“Well, that’s good,” Carter said. “I’d hate for you to travel all that way just to have him die on you.”

“Waste of good vacation days,” she said, then realized that she wasn’t entirely sure whether she meant that is was a waste if Phil died or just a waste that she’d come at all. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

“You’re there because you’ve been in love with Phil Coulson since you were eighteen years old.”

“Yeah, but when I was eighteen I also thought that perming my hair was a good idea and that Wham! was as good as music got.”

“They recorded some classics,” Carter said. “‘Careless Whisper’? Great song.”

“Not the point.” Valerie flopped onto the bed. “Maybe this is over. Maybe this whatever-it-was has run its course. I mean, he did leave me for a cellist who can’t have been out of braces for more than a month. And if he hadn’t nearly died, I don’t know that I would have heard from him again. And I don’t know that that’s the greatest set up for a successful reunion.”

“If that’s the case, then why are you there?”

“Because if I’m wrong about that, I want to know. And if I’m right about that, I don’t want to wonder.”

“That’s fair.”

“How’s everybody there?” Valerie asked.

“We’re good. We’ve almost finished that behemoth of a cake you made.”

“You’re not actually complaining about having leftover cake, are you?”

“Never. Though I don’t have the metabolism I used to.”

“Yeah, but you have two teenaged sons to pick up the slack.”

“First of all, Lucas is not quite twelve, so technically Noah is my only teenaged son. And secondly, Mina’s rationing how much cake they can have each day. She says it’s her cake and you told her she should.”

“It’s the only way to survive with two teenaged or close-enough brothers,” Valerie said.

“You would know,” Carter said. “Speaking of brothers, are you going to call Webb?”

“I texted him and Dad and you when I landed. I don’t know. Webb’s been . . . weird about Phil this past month.”

“He’s been weird for years about all sorts of things. You can’t let it get to you.”

“I don’t. Doesn’t mean I’m always up for not letting it get to me.”

“Okay. And I’m sorry, but I promised Lucas I’d take him for ice cream if he did the dishes and my wife is very pointedly looking at her watch right now.” Valerie heard her sister-in-law indistinctly in the background and then heard Carter say, “It wasn’t that subtle.”

“Be nice to Kyoko,” Valerie said. “The woman is a saint. She --”

“Married me, yes, I know,” Carter said. “You going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” Valerie said. “Tell Lucas that Aunt Valerie said to hold out for a banana split.”

“I probably won’t. I’ll tell him you said hi.”

“It’ll do.”

“Call me again if you need to.”

“I will. Thanks, Carter.”

“Any time.”

Valerie looked again at the suitcase.

She opened it, fished around till she found her pajamas and her toiletries case, and figured everything else could keep till tomorrow. 

 

The Next Day 

He heard her coming again, down the hall, talking to the medical staff. He was pretty sure he heard the words “pound cake.” He supposed it was nice to know she still considered him worth baking bribes for.

“Hi,” Valerie said, coming into his room.

“Hi.”

Phil noted that she hadn’t brought him any baked goods and tried not to read anything into that.

Valerie sat down in the chair by the bed, fidgeting with the visitor lanyard around her neck.

“So,” she said, and then stopped.

“So. What happens now?”

“I’m still trying to understand what happened then,” Valerie said. “I thought we were fine, I thought things were okay, and then suddenly you were dating a cellist. And a cellist who is, as far as I can tell, technically young enough to be our daughter.”

“Do we have to put it that way?”

“I’ll put it any way I want,” Valerie said.

“I . . . how do you know how old Gail is, anyway?”

Valerie dropped the lanyard and waved a hand dismissively. “It’s not that hard to find a cellist named Gail in New York on Facebook.”

“You Facebook stalked Gail?”

“I wanted to see who you left me for.”

“I didn’t leave . . . we weren’t . . . “

“Yes, we were,” Valerie said. “Just because you have a hang up about saying we were a couple doesn’t change the fact that that’s what we were. So what the hell happened, Phil? Did I get too old?”

“No. God, no. You’re not too anything. You’re perfect. You always have been.”

“You’re overstating a little. You always do that when I’m mad at you. Try to distract me with statements like that. It’s your way of avoiding the question. What happened?”

Phil took a breath. “You deserve better.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said it yourself. I couldn’t even say that we were a couple. I have this all-consuming job. I can’t . . . and then Webb said . . .”

Valerie’s eyes narrowed in a way that Phil had known meant he’d said the wrong thing since he was about twenty. “Webb? What does Webb have to do with anything?”

It occurred to Phil that he was probably about to get Valerie’s older brother in a lot of trouble.

“Um, nothing. It doesn’t --“

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence with ‘matter,’” Valerie said. “What did Webb do?”

Phil thought for a moment, then decided there was probably no shielding Webb at this point. “I talked to him at New Year’s. He pointed out that you deserve somebody who can be around. Who can live a life with you. And that I’ve been keeping you from that.”

“So . . . you broke up with me for my own good? Because my older brother told you to?”

“Not . . . exactly,” Phil said.

“Which part of that do I have wrong?”

“He didn’t tell me to. He more suggested that I . . .”

“I’m going to kill you both.”

“He meant well.”

“I’m forty-five years old,” Valerie said. “I don’t need you and my brother meaning well and making decisions for me.”

“He’s not wrong, though.”

“Yes, he is. If I didn’t want to be with you, Phil, I wouldn’t have been with you. If I had decided that finding the kind of relationship you’ve dreamed up for me in your head was what mattered, I would have gone off and found it.”

“So you didn’t want the husband and the two point five kids and the white picket fence?”

“Not more than I wanted you. We don’t get everything we want, Phil. The Rolling Stones were right about that. No one’s life is perfect, and we all make choices about what matters. I decided I wanted this life with you more than I wanted a different life with someone else. If I hadn’t felt that way, I would have gone and found someone I could have the white picket fence life with.”

Phil was silent for a moment, processing that. “Do you still feel that way?”

“I don’t know. I do know this, though. If we’re going to try this again, there are going to have to be some conditions. And some changes. You don’t get to be the only one having his cake and eating it, too, any more.”

“I can’t leave SHIELD,” Phil said, and he probably said it too quickly.

“I’ve never asked you to,” Valerie said. “But let’s be honest. That’s a _won’t_ , not a _can’t_.”

“All right, I won’t leave SHIELD.” 

Valerie raised her eyebrows a little and Phil got the feeling he was probably missing the point. “What, um, what sort of conditions did you have in mind?”

“We’re together or we’re not. I’m in your life -- all of it -- or I’m out of it. I’m not going to do this thing anymore where you’re afraid of the word _relationship_ and I don’t know any of your friends or family while you find excuses to avoid my friends and family as much as possible.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask if that included Webb, but he thought better of it.

“You know there will always be things I can’t tell you about, right?” he said, instead.

Valerie’s eyebrows shot up again. “Are you looking for ways to make this not work?”

“No,” Phil said quickly. “No, but there are parts of my life that you can’t be in.”

“I’m not asking you for state secrets or classified information. I know there are things I can’t know. But I shouldn’t have been meeting Clint and River for the first time in that hospital. And you’re a smart man, Phil. You know the difference.”

“Okay,” he said. 

“And if people ask, you introduce me as your girlfriend. Without hemming or hawing.”

“All right.”

“We go to Pittsburgh and you reintroduce me to your family.”

“I can do that.”

“And if you have any concerns that I am unhappy about something, you discuss them with me. Not my brother.”

“Of course.”

“And you stop rooting for the Pirates and start rooting for the Nationals.”

“I -- wait, what?”

Valerie almost smiled. “Just wanted to make sure you were paying attention, and not just blindly agreeing with me.”

“The Pirates are non-negotiable. For that matter, so are the Steelers and the Penguins.”

“Fine. But you understand, Phil Coulson, that this is, really and truly, your last chance. You screw up that badly again, and we’re done. There will be no reconsidering and no discussion. I will simply leave.”

“I don’t deserve this one.”

“No, you don’t. But it’s my decision to give it to you. Not yours.”

“All right.”

“All right.”

“So we’re . . . okay?”

“We’re getting there.”

“I’ll take it,” Phil said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why’d you stop me? In the hospital? When I tried to tell you . . . why didn’t you let me?”

“Because when a woman has been waiting for a man to tell her something for sixteen years, she wants to know it’s not guilt or painkillers talking when he finally does.”

“They’ve got me off the painkillers,” Phil said.

“And the guilt?”

“I’m working through it.”

“Well, when you have, I guess you’ll have something to say to me.”

“I’ll have a lot to say to you. But I know where I’ll start.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is mountain_born's sandbox, she just lets me play in it, and I'm grateful. She's also an awesome beta and one heck of a friend.


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